Delightful Spring

Oh, what a delightful migration we've had. We've been busy, but have been home more than any May in memory. So I've had time to plant and weed and mulch and till and mow--all the things that somehow have to be added into the mix come spring. That makes me a much happier camper than when we run all over the country working festivals. I'm beginning to see what I should be doing less, what I should be doing more.


Going out to photograph birds with Bill in the morning is just about my favorite thing. We don't forget for a second how blessed we are that we can do this right outside our house, on this sanctuary we've made. Little visitors pass through and we try to capture their images, to show you these things we cherish. It isn't easy. Ask Bill of the Birds.


Pine siskins have finally left as of today. I wouldn't be too surprised to find them nesting around here, as they're nomadic little things, subject to whim. They share the Spa with a tired Gouty, the bluebird who's feeding four fledged daughters.


A red-bellied woodpecker has chosen the gutter over Phoebe's window for a drumming site.

He looks proud of himself at the end of each BRRUUUUUUMMMMPPP! Luckily, he drums after she's off to school, but she's not going to like it very much come summer vacation. These shots were taken from the birding tower, a perspective we don't often get on woodpeckers.


Discoveries await everywhere I turn. I heard a gnatcatcher's purr, looked up, saw this shredded bark and mused, "Ahh, nesting time. Everyone's gathering nesting material."
And there was the gnatcatcher, so I watched him until he led me to his nest.

It's done, and he plops right into it to incubate the eggs. See his tail sticking up like a popsicle stick?

Here's a closer look. Of all the birds that nest here, the blue-gray gnatcatcher reveals its nest the most readily. It's almost as if they're proud of it, the way they carry on and show it to you.
It's been the best spring for Blackburnian warblers that I can remember. That doesn't mean I've gotten stunning shots, but I keep trying.

Soon, the migrants will be gone altogether, but for now we seek them out and enjoy them while we can.

I've spent the day painting a beach scene with Caspian terns. I have to stretch way back in my memory to get the feel of the beach, but it's coming together nicely. The trick being not to get too tense and tight. Gotta let paint be paint. I've also been on the phone with Customer Service at Uncle Milton's, the manufacturer of the Pet's Eye View camera Chet used until it finked out on us. I gave them my blog URL, which is being passed around their HQ as we speak, and have high hopes they'll see the eminent sense of replacing this wondrous but broken little thing. I've gotten only four sessions out of it and am hungry for more. I keep seeing golden opportunities to send Chet Baker on photo safari.

Sumac-A Wildlife Survival Food

I love to capture images of birds at the feeder, but a hundred times more satisfying are images of birds eating what they're supposed to eat--the native seeds and fruits that abound in our yard, fields and forest. It's hard to get close enough with a 300 mm. lens without scaring the bird, so my pictures are often taken through the window of my big, heated, supremely comfortable blind: my house.
American goldfinches and pine siskins are always working on the seeds of the gray birches we've planted all over the yard. What they knock to the snow, the juncos, tree sparrows and field sparrows clean up.

Sumac rings all our meadows--five species in all. Here, a red-bellied woodpecker works on the fruits.
Turning about, he shows the origin of his seeming misnomer. I love this shot.


To me, the northern flicker is so impossibly beautiful that I can hardly believe it exists. I love, love, love to paint flickers. There's so much to do! This is a male, with a black moustache mark.

Sumac is a good food for wildlife because there's nothing in it that spoils or ferments, and it stays fresh from when it first ripens in October until at least May. It's always available, kind of the way All-Bran is always around. It may not be your first choice, but it's food.

As I shot the flicker, I was wishing hard that I was closer, that it wasn't so gray out...and yet the images have a simple beauty that I love.

Who thought up all those markings? They are perfect. The bird is cryptic from above, spectacular from below--good for a ground-feeder. Flickers huddle on the ground, digging for ants in the summer, and they're all but invisible to predators with those brown-barred backs.

Yet when they wish to make a splash they've got all the badges and bling they need.


Ahh. That's the one. I must paint it someday.

Ruby

When you live in a place long enough, and you're lucky enough to be able to work at home and stare out the windows at the birds for part of each day, you can get to know them as individuals. It helps when a bird has distinctive markings--maybe missing feathers on the hindcrown, like one male indigo bunting who nested here for many years. Perhaps there's a drooping wing, like that of the bluebird we called Mr. Troyer. He nested in our yard for eight years, and I still miss him. There's a long story behind him, but that's one for the next book.
Speaking of distinctive markings, this is Snowflake (who I began calling Queen Frostine), a leucistic female dark-eyed junco who has been with us for three winters, growing whiter each year. She's a Zick Dough freak, and I'd love to think that we've just sent her to Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire or Ontario with an ample pad of fat for the flight, and a good start for the breeding season ahead. The last juncoes left on April 17 as they do every year. You can imagine how excited we'll be should Queen Frostine show up again next winter. She's our friend.

Ruby is a beautiful female red-bellied woodpecker. This is her third year with us (that I know of). Year to year, she's displayed a consistent mark: two tiny red bindis in her otherwise gray forecrown. She's also got really red nares just above the bill, which is a sign of her maturity, as is the faint wash of red along her malar (jaw) area).
Those two simple feathers, and the fact that I happened to notice them, elevate her status from that of Just Another Redbelly to a Named Bird, a friend. It's a human conceit, of course, that she's special because I've named her, but it helps me to feel a bond with her from year to year, and it makes me more interested in watching her behavior. There's value in that, if only for me as the observer. She's certainly interested in my behavior; she waits each morning in the willow or on the chimney for me to pop out with the Zick Dough. Recipe here. She's probably noticed that I have more gray streaks in my forecrown this year than last, and a bunch more than three years ago. Ruby, we'll talk.

Sometimes she's dainty about helping herself to dough
and sometimes she grabs the biggest glob she can find to bear off and cache.
I never tire of watching Ruby, of noticing what, besides those two little red feathers, makes her an individual.
Wouldn't you think she'd spread her wings for the leap down to the railing? I think she wants to avoid knocking the dough to the ground with the backwash from her wings, that's what I think.

I like Ruby; I like knowing that she knows me and looks forward to seeing me, too. She's not a pet, but neither is she just another bird to me. She's my neighbor, my friend.

Beauty on Ice

Sometimes, when it's so cold you don't even want to stick your nose outside, the colors are so beautiful that you MUST put on coat, hat and gloves and do your duty as an intrepid liver of life. Chet and I walked out to the mailbox to see Phoebe and Liam off to school. The hayfield was a cluster of diamonds.Each stalk of dried Queen Anne's lace was that much lacier.Chet Baker made his way through all that beauty, holding up first one paw and then the other. See how his mouth is all drawn up? That's his cold face.
The milkweed pods had a special magic.Back home at the feeders, things were hopping.

Our gorgeous female hairy woodpecker paused in her search for more suet.

The male red-bellied woodpecker glowed like a hot coal in the single digits.A cardinal offered up his own coals, his tinged with ash.
It's good to get out on cold mornings.


This morning at daybreak, I heard three peents from a woodcock in the field. Just three peents, no display flight. "I'm here. But it's too cold to think of love." I was glad to hear him, and I wondered what he'd been through. While we were gone, our feeders all went empty; all the Zick dough I'd labored to make up in advance had never been put out. It had been in the single digits and we'd had four inches of snow, topped with ice. I grieved for my bird friends, what they'd been through in the worst of the winter without me to help them. Today, I put out three feedings of Zick dough, and three bluebirds, a bunch of cardinals, a red-bellied woodpecker, and the leucistic junco Snowflake (who I've renamed Queen Frostine) came to partake. They're so glad I'm home, and I'm so glad to see them! I know they don't need me as much as I think they do.

I'm running around, re-provisioning, taking out garbage, doing laundry, cooking, watering, digging out. Treated myself to a Shila massage, trying to re-align muscles and bones bent by carrying a backpack full of lead-weight optics all over Guatemala and North America. I was amazed how much more in-tune I felt after some adjustment.

I hope frosty scenes like these will be a distant memory now, in the latest, coldest early spring I can remember. The daffodils are budding anyway. Here's a little titmouse. He looks as wistful for balmy breezes as I feel right now.It's about time for some Guatemala color, don't you think?